In a last ditch effort to save the Crooked Creek Days celebration in the city of Winfield this summer, a special meeting is scheduled tomorrow night to gauge the level of community interest.

Deputy City Clerk Lisa Rees says the Winfield Community Development Group (WCDG) will host a town hall at 6 p.m. in the Winfield Veteran’s Building. She says the WCDG doesn’t have the manpower to organize the August festivities, so they need to get more people involved, “If everybody just kind of takes a little bit of the puzzle, then we can get one committee of three to five people that can just oversee it all, make sure the schedule is going to flow and then the weekend goes by really smoothly. But it’s when that committee has to do all of the events, that’s what makes it hard.”

Rees adds no one is obligated to any commitments by attending the meeting, but they are at a critical stage to decide the fate of this year’s event. She is unsure if the celebration will survive if it doesn’t happen in 2021, “That’s always a fear I think. It’s easier to keep a ball going that’s already started, but trying to get things started back up again, it can be hard. But then again the community could realize that, ‘Wow, we really do miss Crooked Creek Days, let’s not let it happen again.’”

The three-day event, which started in 1994, was held last year despite COVID-19, but attendance was greatly reduced, which has impacted funding for this year’s event. Rees says annual expenses for the festivities have been as much as $24,000 including $10,000 for fireworks. Currently they have only $700 in their account.